UNSTRUCK MELODY is a collaboration between British-born Canadian artist Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu and without SHAPE without FORM, first presented as part of the 2023 London Design Festival at the V&A South Kensington.
Across large-scale tapestries, mixed-media paintings and film, the exhibition explores Sikh teachings through the interconnected practices of Simran (focused practice for the mind), Seva (selfless service) and Sangat (community and gathering). Together, these works invite visitors on a transformative journey of the mind.
The exhibition takes its title from Anhad Shabad, the ‘unstruck melody’, an inner sound understood within Sikh philosophy as a pathway to deeper awareness and knowledge, accessed through deep listening and focused practice. Simran is presented as a practical tool for eliminating thought and cultivating clarity, peace and connection.
BIOGRAPHY, NIRBHAI (NEP) SINGH SIDHU: is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who works through labor-based knowledge production, Sikh interiority, and blood memory as an adaptive method for resilience and remembrance. For this exhibition, Sidhu will create a new body of drawings, sculptures, multimedia works, and paintings that reflects a Simran focused visual output to address realities of languaging and musicking as natural modes of ‘embodying a text’ (Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji) or ‘becoming the sound’ (Unstruck Melody) in the pursuit of expanding the mind while losing one’s autobiographical self.
Nep’s practice draws from a personal lifetime and family lineage of working in metal manufacturing plants in Toronto and the building of community-based sites for youth development such as Sher-E-Punjab Sports Academy in Chakar, Punjab.
Through sound and silence, precedent works by the artist reveal an expansion of both the social external and cellular internal including omni-directional sound systems such as A Disappearance Potential (2021) and the interactive counter surveillance drum machine engaged by the public as a dual pinball arcade entitled The PIGG500 Security and Leisure Enhancement Console (2017). His varying material approaches to artmaking put forth a nondual guiding principle of detachment, leading to hyper presence, as seen in They Awakened in Algorithm (2021), an embroidered painting which bring together text, glyphs, architecture, and patterning. The ambition of his work is “to center realities of oneness that we don’t encounter physically, by pointing to the ecstatic and sensual in revealing a greater presence, with entities, ideas and one another.”
Nep’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya City Museum, Japan; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Esker Foundation, Calgary; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. He is a member of the Black Constellation collective and designs clothing and adornment under the Paradise Sportif moniker.
Opening Hours:
Sun–Tue: Closed
Wed-Sat: 12–6pm
First and third Sat of each month: 12–7pm
FREE and OPEN TO ALL
Address:
without SHAPE without FORM HQ
221 Bath Road,
Slough,
SL1 4AA
https://www.withoutshapewithoutform.com/exhibitions/unstruck-melody-hq